Inanis.net

Had some extra hardware come into my possession, so I upgraded the Inanis.net server today. Upgraded the Athlon XP 1700+ to a 2800+, bumped it up to 1GB RAM, doubled the Hard Drive to 80GB and replaced the motherboard (or mobo, to the geeks). I had planned on putting the new CPU and RAM in the original mobo, but I found out the old mobo had a couple of capacitors that were starting to puff up, so I went full tilt. This upgrade was much easier than the last one I did. I used CloneZilla to copy the Hard Drive, and brought the new machine up beside the old one, to reduce downtime. I got the X Server configured correctly and made sure the network card worked properly (which, this time, was not an issue, not like last time), then switched the box over. Total downtime: about 10 minutes.

Life goes on.

I recently came across a couple of processors that just so happen to match a couple of old Motherboards I have. I threw all the hardware together and now I have a couple more render boxes for my POVRay exploits. That puts my rendering CPU Core Count at 7:

• Core 2 Duo E4300 @2.7GHz (2)
• Pentium D 805 @ 3.62 GHz (2)
• Athlon XP 1800+ @ 2GHz (1)
• Athlon XP 2000+ @ 1.78GHz (1)
• Athlon XP 1700+ @ 1.65GHz (1)

Gonna get everything squared away and try some test renders today .. if I can ever get woken up. Weekends + me = sleeeeeeeeeep.

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On related news, I’ve been looking into MegaPOV XRS instead of SMPOV+POVRay. The SMPOV router is much easier for an old Windows salt like me to operate, but MegaPOV XRS is FASTER. Only one parse/photon pass per job run with MegaPOV XRS. Each machine doesnt have to parse and photon for every chunk it calculates like SMPOV and the system integrates much better.

So, about a month ago my video card died. It was an MSI Radeon X1900XT 512MB PCI-e. Nice card, quite fast. One day, it just refused to show video.

I gave the part back to my vendor, since it was within 1 year and said “replace it”. The vendor sent it back to MSI for repair/swap.

Fast forward to yesterday. It took MSI forever to get my card back to me, but they did come though. I got the replacement card, and there was good news. It was an upgrade. A free upgrade. To a much nicer card. An nVidia 8800 GTS 320MB. MSI seriously pumped my video performance for free. WOOT! (Check ‘em out on Toms’ Hardware…)

I took out the crappy PCI Radeon 9250 I had been limping along with and installed the 8800GTS. Went to nVidia’s website. Installed the newest drivers. Everything looked great. My LDView models looked great, and rotated faster than 1 frame every aeon.

Naturally, because of the nice upgrade, this called for updating the 3DMark scores on the website here. I fired up 3DMark and ran it through the minimum tests required to get a score. I thought it ran slow, and I was right. The final score was 2000 points SLOWER than the card I had originally.

WTF!

I did some research and tried everything everyone said about this card, my Motherboard, and even the card brand. I uninstalled drivers, ran DriverCleaner, and reinstalled. No joy. I tried updating DirectX. No joy. I removed all unnecessary cards, drives, and peripherals. No Joy. I made sure my powersupply was properly rated for the card. It was. I even went so far as to disconnect my OS drive and connect a new one, then install a clean copy of Windows, then the chipset driver, then the
video driver, you know, the proper order to ensure happy video goodness. NO JOY!

The only thing that I could think of is that the CPU is overclocked, and perhaps there was some sort of odd timing thing. I dropped the Core 2 Duo E4300 from it’s happy perch at 2.7 Ghz back to is lowly origins at 1.8Ghz. Lo and behold, the card perks up and is nice and snappy.

WTF, part 2!

Now, I researched specifics about my card coupled with my motherboard, a Gigabyte 965P-DS3 v2.0. Nobody had any real suggestions. So I started playing with Front side bus settings, memory ratios, and PCI-e bus settings. Nothing I tried worked. I decided to flash the BIOS from the version I had, F9, to the newest, F11. No joy.

I then did some more Googling, because by this time, I am ready to try any hairbrained idea I could find, and I found this cool forum post talking about how to get the most out of your DS3 motherboard. I tried doing everything they said there, including increasing the PCI-e bus to 102mhz. Still, no Joy. I tried 104Mhz. No POST.

At this point, I start fudging around with the FSB setting, starting at the default of 200Mhz and bumping it one Mhz at a time, trying to see where the breaking point was. I found it, at a measly 205mhz. I needed to be at 300Mhz to get my machine back to 2.7Ghz. All of this leads me to think there is some sort of weird timing/sync issue between the FSB and the PCI-e bus that makes the video card wait for a couple of cycles before pushing out data, or whatever.

I went back to that cool forum post and read all of the comments at the bottom. Some people were reporting about instability issues, and stating that there are many people who had success with this instability by bumping up their PCI-e bus above 110-115mhz stabilized their systems. I thought “fork!” because mine would not work above 104! I dropped back into the BIOS and set it to 110, thinking “what the hell, worst that will happen is it won’t POST again.”

It worked. OMGWTFBBQ, it f***ing worked. At a PCI-e setting of 110 mhz, and with my CPU overclocked to it’s fast 2.7Ghz, the machine POSTed, booted, ran 3DMark06, and gave a nice score of 9551 3DMarks.

I HATE COMPUTER HARDWARE, and love it at the same time. What else can exasperate you yet engage your mind to it’s fullest at the same time?

Not much, that’s what.

Check out my new speccies, here.

I want a couple of these solid-state flash-based storage devices for my computer. Goodbye load times, hello fast-as-hell rig. I would also love to have one of these 19″ LCD monitors. The reviews are friggin’ awesome, and my monitor is starting to get a little faded at the corners.

Alas, they are not to be, because I have to make my house look pretty so I can sell it and get out from under it before it falls on me .. . and then I’ll really have to get out from under it. The house repairs are much more important and will be worth it later on. I just hope the housing market collapse doesn’t bite me in the ass when I need to get out of here…